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Fictitious play in 3x3 games: Chaos and dithering behaviour

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  • van Strien, Sebastian
  • Sparrow, Colin

Abstract

In the 60's Shapley provided an example of a two player fictitious play which generates periodic behaviour. In this game, player A prefers to copy B's behaviour and player B prefers to play one strategy ahead of player A. In this paper we continue to study a family of games which generalise Shapley's example by introducing an external parameter, and prove that there exists an abundance of periodic and chaotic behaviour with players dithering between different strategies. The reason for all this, is that there exists a periodic orbit (consisting of playing mixed strategies) which is of 'jitter type': such an orbit is neither attracting, repelling or of saddle type as nearby orbits jitter closer and further away from it in a manner which is reminiscent of a random walk motion. We prove that this behaviour holds for an open set of games.

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  • van Strien, Sebastian & Sparrow, Colin, 2011. "Fictitious play in 3x3 games: Chaos and dithering behaviour," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 262-286, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:73:y:2011:i:1:p:262-286
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    References listed on IDEAS

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